Many tech marketing professionals that we meet share a similar struggle: how to articulate the high level of innovation that’s core to their business. With countless competitors hawking the same innovation story in slightly different ways, it’s reached the point where claims of innovation go largely ignored, lost in a sea of sameness. 

Fortunately, it’s still possible to tell your innovation story in an impactful way—and it doesn’t involve words. Through the power of great design, you can establish your company and your technology as innovation leaders. Below are four design tactics that we’ve found to be effective at conveying innovation.

1. Go more emotional, less cerebral

Many tech companies fall into the trap of overcomplicating their visual identity. You might be tempted to showcase intricate diagrams of technical workflows or detailed flowcharts of processes. There is certainly a time and place for these technical details. But if you’re telling a truly innovative, visionary story, your first impression should connect with your audience on an emotional level.

The most effective brand identities in tech today are moving away from literal representations towards more abstract, emotive imagery. Instead of trying to explain every nuance of your product’s mechanism of action, consider focusing on the broader benefits and emotional impact of your innovation.

How can you achieve this shift? Here are some design strategies to consider:

• Create a custom photographic style that infuses warmth and humanity into your brand 
• Use an ownable illustration style to convey abstract concepts
• Use visual metaphors to convey complex ideas simply and memorably
• Incorporate 3D renderings and motion graphics to create dynamic, engaging brand experiences

Once you liberate your brand from the rigid constraints of technical representation, you open up a world of creative possibilities. This approach allows you to craft a visual story that resonates on a deeper level with your target audience, forging an emotional connection that goes beyond the technical specifics.

2. Innovation in the design details

Most groundbreaking brands know that design is a product of innovation, and they convey their innovative vision through the details of their design. Modern fonts, custom imagery, vibrant and distinctive color palettes, contemporary layouts, and so many more design elements provide all of the ingredients needed to build a visual system that makes the point. 

Let’s just focus on the color blue for a moment. Blue has long been a go-to color for many tech brands. Decades ago, there was a research study that found that blue is commonly associated with trust and calm. Apparently, that was all that it took for thousands of companies to jump on the bluewagon. The result? An ocean of calming brands struggling to develop brand awareness or recall. Today’s most forward-thinking organizations are embracing vibrant, bold and even surprising color palettes that stand out and make a lasting impression.

Crafting a distinctive visual identity
When developing your brand’s visual system, consider the following:

• Select a unique font with distinct characteristics that are recognizably different from the typical bland fonts that dominate the industry.
• If you’re open to a fresh color palette, conduct competitive research that focuses specifically on color, and choose a palette that can be unique to your brand.
• If you’re tied to your primary color, expand the palette. Add secondary colors that bring a more modern edge and extend the flexibility of your system.
• Unclutter your brand. Open up and simplify your marketing tools. A clean, contemporary layout will convey cutting-edge confidence.
• If you sell physical products, develop a library of exceptional photography or 3D renderings that glorify your tech. 

Of course, these decisions shouldn’t be made with the sole intent to be different. They should also align with your brand personality and resonate with your target audience. If they do, your visual identity will reinforce your brand strategy and connect with your audiences in unforgettable ways.

3. Break out of the B2B mindset

Long ago, we discarded the concept of the B2B brand. In our opinion (and we’re not alone in this POV), all brands are B2C. Why? First of all, because real people are always the audience, and people make purchasing decisions based on emotional and philosophical alignment with brands, whether they’re buying a pair of jeans or a CRM solution. Second, traditional “B2B branding” promotes a conservative and conformative approach that all but dooms a business to obscurity in today’s highly competitive, brand-first commercial landscape.  

To convey your company’s progressive culture, consider these B2C strategies:

• Adopt a more conversational voice and tone in your communications
• Embrace a more expressive and dynamic visual identity
• Take calculated risks with progressive visual aesthetics
• Infuse your brand with authenticity and humanity

By bringing more personality and emotion into your branding, you’re not just making your company more approachable—you’re modernizing your brand. You’re developing authentic, human connections with the people that matter most.

4. Use the power of custom imagery

When it comes to technical imagery, stock images are always a convenient and affordable solution. They are also a surefire way to ensure that few, if any, observers see you as an innovative company. Cheap, easy visuals take up space but they fail to capture or convey the unique virtues of your brand and business.  

Custom visual assets, including original photography and custom illustration, offer several advantages:

• Distinction: Custom visuals are unique to your business, and ensure your brand looks distinctly different from competitors.
• Clarity: Tailored visuals convey the complex technical concepts specific to your business far more accurately and quickly than stock imagery.
• Consistency: A library of custom assets brings a level of cohesion to all your brand touchpoints that elevates perceptions.
• Memorability: Custom, owned visuals are far more likely to stick in the minds of your audiences, improving brand recall.

Investing in custom visual assets allows you to build a visual language that speaks directly to your audience and clearly communicates your brand’s unique value proposition.

Innovation by design

From emotive imagery and vibrant color palettes to conversational tonality and contemporary aesthetics, each element of your visual identity can help to convey the innovative nature of your business—all without saying a word. As you embark on your next branding initiative, think beyond the expected. Push boundaries until you’re uncomfortable, and then push a little more. Only then will you discover an entirely new visual language—a brand dialect that no one else speaks. Commit to that path, and you’ll launch a brand identity that not only says “innovation” but one that becomes synonymous with the idea.

2024 didn’t feature quite as many household brand overhauls as the previous year, but there were still a few bangers out there. Enjoy our second annual Rebrand Report Card—a look back at the best and worst rebrands of the year.

7UP: Fizzy moments of joy

Grade: A

Pepsi’s portfolio refresh began last year with the rebrand of its flagship soda, and continued in 2024 with the redesign of 7UP. Nothing radical about this rebrand, but the citrusy palette, upward energy, and punchy vibe all combine for a bright new look that is still 100% 7UP—with a modern twist.

Bumble: Don’t mess with nuns

Grade: F

Coined “The Bumble Fumble,” this dating app’s 2024 rebrand is a cautionary tale for companies thinking of shortcutting the important research and discovery phases of a rebrand. Lacking proper research, Bumble launched a rebrand campaign that not only failed to address the real frustrations of their users, but managed to disparage nuns and offend most women in the process.

RSPCA: Awwwwwww

Grade: A+

We love a good legacy brand refresh, and the RSPCA rebrand, the first in 50 years for the world’s largest welfare animal charity, does not disappoint. More than just a modernization, the rebrand is rooted in comprehensive research, designed to reconnect with society, and engineered to support the charity as it tackles unprecedented animal welfare challenges.

Toledo Museum of Art: Ultra-modern heritage

Grade: A

Sticking with the legacy theme, we’re big fans of the new TMA system. The rebrand was a much-needed update and departure from its previous system, which was clunky and dated. The new visual identity is dynamic, dimensional, unpredictable and, in execution, strikes a perfect balance of emphasis between museum identity and featured art.

KitKat: Break me off a piece

Grade: B

KitKat has joined the chorus of food brands opting for a retro look with their recent rebrand. More of a tasty refresh than a complete rebrand, the focal point of this update was the logo, which features straighter, chunkier type that is designed to look as if it’d give a loud, tasty snap if broken in two.

Jaguar: An automotive hail mary

Grade: TBD

A lot has already been said about this circus. The vast majority has been negative, and perhaps rightfully so, but we’re going to give the executives at Jaguar credit for having the courage to pull the trigger on what they surely knew was going to be a controversial scorching of 100 years of heritage. But with sales in a death spiral, this desperate last-ditch attempt at relevance might yet turn out to be a stroke of brilliance. As Jaguar’s chief creative officer Gerry McGovern stated, “We’re delighted to have your attention.”

Mozilla: Fun with ASCII

Grade: A

For fans of early web aesthetics, there’s much to love about this new system from internet trailblazer Mozilla. From the black and white palette to the cleverly pixelated logomark and mascot, Mozilla’s new brand identity is a nostalgic system that delivers on their brand strategy to “reclaim the internet.”

IKONO: Redefining immersive

Grade: A+

Maybe some bias here, but the IKONO rebrand was one of our team’s favorite projects of the year. The new identity combines a vibrant palette, unique shape library, custom illustrations, bold type, and a playful voice to showcase IKONO’s eclectic worlds that combine art, play, and the unexpected.

Vast: The next giant leap

Grade: A+

As a creative partner to NASA’s Space Center Houston, we’re constantly on the lookout for giant brand leaps in the space exploration industry. Vast’s striking new identity revisits the 1970s ethos of NASA with stunning attention to detail.

When Legion approached us with their vision for a premium, all-natural energy drink, we knew this wasn’t going to be a typical can design. With a clientele that values what they put into their bodies, Legion’s new energy drink needed to communicate these values instantly on the shelf. This project was more than creating an eye-catching can—it was about delivering a brand that resonates with Legion’s health-conscious, fitness-driven audience.

Our creative process started with Legion’s core objectives: the can needed to feel premium and contemporary, align with their existing brand identity, and stand out in a crowded market dominated by artificially sweetened competitors. We presented Legion with several unique design directions, each exploring different approaches to typography, color, and imagery. We worked closely with the Legion team to refine the chosen design, bringing their vision to life with a perfect blend of boldness and sophistication.

The final design is more than just visually striking—it communicates what sets Legion apart. This is an energy drink that doesn’t rely on artificial ingredients but instead offers a clean, powerful boost that consumers can trust and is truly delicious. The can itself is designed to evoke a sense of natural energy, with colors and imagery inspired by Legion’s commitment to transparency and quality. Every element, from the flavor treatment to the clean layout, is crafted to invite consumers into a premium experience while reminding them of Legion’s science-backed, honest approach to health and wellness.

We’re thrilled with the result and can’t wait to see it on shelves. Legion’s entry into the energy drink space isn’t just a new product—it’s a statement that natural, performance-driven energy can be both effective and guilt-free. As Legion expands its presence beyond supplements, we’re proud to have created a design that reflects their unwavering dedication to excellence and resonates with both their loyal fans and a new generation of energy drink consumers.

October is the perfect time to dive into a topic that strikes fear into the hearts of founders and executives: naming. Nothing breeds more C-suite paranoia than the process of choosing a name. Many believe that the company’s moniker is the single most critical decision of their professional lives and that a misstep could instantly doom the brand to the graveyard of failed businesses with botched names.

Yet there are hundreds of companies with dreadful names. Big companies. Thriving companies. Beloved brands that have succeeded despite having a name that, by all objective considerations, should have rendered them dead on arrival. 

Below is a list of eight horrifyingly successful company names. These names prove the core argument of this article: that the importance of a company name is often overblown. And that even the most monstrous moniker, when supported by consistent brand-building efforts, can rise from the ashes.

8. Google

It’s hard to imagine a naming agency entering a conference room, presenting this nonsensical babble as a serious naming candidate, and not getting laughed out of the building and the account. It’s not even spelled right. The word is “Googol”. So how did this absurd typo become one of the most powerful brands in history? By filling it with meaning through consistently awesome brand experiences.

7. Lululemon

If you don’t know the origin story of this ridiculous name, Google it. It’s appalling. So appalling that the founder (and namer) got a $845M payday and Lululemon is now a $34 billion company. How could any company survive such a disastrous name? Easy—great product design, great branding, and great marketing. Lululemon proves that a company can survive a name that is luludicrous, unpronounceable, and culturally offensive, all at once.

6. Haagen-Dazs

Those who speak Danish will of course know that the phrase “haagen-dazs” translates loosely to…absolutely nothing. It’s Nordical nonsense. It’s made-up gibberish intended to give this very American ice cream a European flair. And it checks all the boxes of a name that is sure to fail: Unpronounceable? Check. Unspellable? Check. Hyphenated? Check. And yet there you are, alone with a pint, reading this article.

5. IKEA

No naming horror show would be complete without an acronym. Here’s something you’ll wish you didn’t know: IKEA stands for Ingvar Kamprad (the founder), Elmtaryd (his family farm), and Agunnaryd (his hometown in Sweden). Luckily, those barely related terms start with letters that just seem to flow together. We’re kidding, it’s naming carnage. And yet there you are, eating your Haagen-Dazs, sitting on a Poäng.

4. Pepsi

Picture this: You’re launching a new beverage brand, and you’ve hired an agency to come up with a name. The date of the first naming presentation arrives, and you couldn’t be more excited. After the typical rigmarole, the agency unveils just one name: “Pepsi.” OK, weird, you think. But the agency lead, sensing your hesitation, leans in to seal the deal and says: “Here’s the best part: it’s short for ‘dyspepsia,’ or indigestion.”

3. Microsoft

Nothing screams scale and strength like the words “micro” and “soft,” right? Microsoft would have been the logical choice for a company that produces premium pillows. Or mini plush toys. Or baby wipes. But a global tech juggernaut? It’s just further proof that through the magic of branding, company names are quickly redefined in the minds of consumers. Honorable mention goes to “Azure”, Microsoft’s wholly unpronounceable and yet most lucrative cloud platform.

2. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse

Here’s the story behind this name wreck: In 1965 a woman named Ruth purchased a New Orleans restaurant called “Chris Steak House”—already an awful name. 10 years later, a fire burned it to the ground. Ruth relocated but, for some legal reason, couldn’t reuse the original name. Her solution? The garbled mess that no one can clearly remember or say: “Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.” The consequence of such a hack job? 150 locations across North America and growing.

1. Kum & Go

The horror. Surely this demented name dragged its naughty owner to an early grave, right? You guessed it: steady growth now reaching 400 locations across 13 states, and a 2023 acquisition estimated to be valued at $2B. The point here is not to condone or encourage this level of absurdity. But it does raise a question: if a company with blatant sexual innuendo in its name can succeed—how bad does a name have to be to fail?

Don’t be afraid

Take comfort in the fact that these and countless other companies have thrived despite having gruesome names. Names are essentially blank slates—empty vessels filled with meaning through consistent brand-building efforts. So don’t overthink it. Don’t let the process paralyze you with fear. Choose a name that you can live with, activate your brand, and watch as your moniker takes on an entirely new meaning in the minds of your customers.

And if you need someone to hold your hand as you journey through your own house of naming horrors, we’re here for you.

Brand architecture is one of our favorite subjects. For the uninitiated, brand professionals use the term “architecture” to define the framework that helps everyone make sense of the hierarchy and relationships between brands and/or products in a company’s portfolio. Brand architecture is often visualized as a tiered diagram— typically in either the “branded house” or “house of brands” model—and serves as a guide for categorizing, naming and presenting sub-brands so audiences can easily understand each offering.

Most companies have an existing architecture for their brands, whether it is the outcome of an intentional, strategically-driven structuring, or the arbitrary result of expansion. Either way, there often comes a point when architecture becomes a roadblock to growth, particularly when a company expands into new markets, changes its focus, or goes through a complex merger or acquisition. 

If you think that brand architecture may be limiting your company’s progress, here are seven common symptoms that may indicate your architecture needs some love:

Symptom #1: Multiple brands fight for attention on your marketing materials.

If your marketing materials have become a battleground between a parent and sub-brand, or if multiple sub-brands play tug of war with the look and feel of your marketing, your architecture may need a hierarchy tuneup. When sub-brands cause chaos in marketing materials, your communications risk being less memorable and less likely to land with customers.

Symptom #2: You’re overwhelmed by naming.

Creating ownable brand names is no small task, but it can seem impossible if your brand portfolio lacks a cohesive system. Common symptoms include multiple naming approaches in use (some descriptive, others abstract), inconsistent naming structures (single vs. multiple-word) or non-distinguishable modifiers (Ultra vs. Plus vs. Premium vs. Pro). The root cause of naming chaos is often found in the organization of your architecture, or lack thereof.

Symptom #3: Your employees are confused by your product offerings.

Even well-informed employees can still be uncertain of the role certain brands play in a portfolio. These are smart people with intimate knowledge of the organization, so if they don’t understand the differences between brands or how they all align under your mission, it’s unlikely that customers will either. Brand architecture can make this crystal clear.

Symptom #4: Customer service primarily helps prospects identify which products are right for them

And a related symptom: your sales team struggles to cross-sell. These are telltale signs that your architecture isn’t providing needed clarity around your offerings. Customers may not only be confused, but completely unaware that your company offers certain brands.

Symptom #5: Your sub-brand organization doesn’t reflect your positioning strategy.

Your sub-brand categorization and hierarchy should help communicate what your company values. When they don’t, individual sub-brands can’t benefit from the synergy of a larger group, and your overarching brand will face a steeper climb to achieve relevance.

Symptom #6: Several sub-brands compete for the same customer

This is often caused by mergers and acquisitions, but any time sub-brands compete for the same consumer in the same use case, a culling or repositioning of brands may be in order. If nothing else, re-examining the organizing principles of your current architecture is a worthwhile exercise to find unseen opportunities.

Symptom #7: You lack the resources to sustain all the brands in your portfolio.

The inability to support brands at an appropriate level is often a sign of having too many brands. Many business factors may contribute to a lack of resources, but a review of your architecture can offer clarity and level-setting as to how your brand and marketing resources should be prioritized.

If your brand suffers from one or more of these symptoms, examining your brand architecture is a valuable endeavor. The good news is that once diagnosed, any of these architecture ailments are absolutely treatable with a little TLC. And for that, just reach out to us.

Legacy brands are some of our most interesting clients. They each bring with them a powerful asset—decades of brand equity built on tradition, quality, and customer loyalty. It’s real substance that our team can enthusiastically and creatively explore. However, many legacy brands also come to Traina struggling with their heritage, an anchor weighing the brand down, making it feel outdated and irrelevant.

Refreshing a legacy brand requires walking a tightrope—respecting iconic heritage while modernizing the brand to address today’s trends and audience preferences. That’s why these brands make such interesting clients and case studies. If your brand fits the legacy mold, here are a few tips to consider when embarking on a refresh:

1. Dig Into Your Roots

Before making changes, deeply understand the authentic roots of your brand’s heritage. What core elements initially made it distinctive and special? Build from that bedrock rather than discard everything. For example, re-examining the core ideology of our client Space Center Houston confirmed the brand’s unique mission and led to the creation of a brand purpose––to bring people and space closer together––serving as a contemporary rally cry.

2. Evolve, Don’t Overhaul

A dramatic overhaul is usually DOA for a heritage brand because it severs any authentic connection the brand has with its current customer base. Instead, evolve the brand incrementally over time with careful, iterative updates.

3. Focus on Experience

Don’t just rebrand surface elements. Modernize the entire brand experience across touchpoints to provide new reasons for modern consumers to love your legacy brand. Our revamping of in-store branding for Stater Bros. Markets is one such example.

4. Target New Audiences

Identify the new demographics and psychographics you want to attract. But don’t alienate loyal legacy customers in the process. You need to court both groups. See our work with UC San Diego Health, helping them expand into new customer territories.

5. Lean Into Your Story

Your unique origin story and brand heritage are modern differentiators in a sea of sameness. Just retell that story in fresh, relevant ways that resonate today.

The underlying assumptions accompanying these tips are that your brand is clear on why current customers remain loyal and what prospective customers will find intriguing about your longstanding success. If you’re not sure, lean on your agency to conduct a quick market research study and a cultural trends analysis to shine a light on your brand’s past, present and potential future. 

So your brand is baked and you are eager to share it with the world, but there’s another critical step to take first: the internal brand rollout. How do you successfully introduce your brand to those who will personify it every day?

For starters, it will take more than a one-way announcement. A strategic plan of immersive activities and trainings will allow the brand to truly take root after its jaw-dropping reveal. Drawing on Traina’s experience rolling out brands for small businesses to international corporations, we created this quick-start guide to give a glimpse into how it all happens.

Step 1:
Assemble your team

While marketing departments are typically tasked with brand launch planning and execution, consider a cross-functional launch committee. Bring others into the fold—like HR, DE&I teams, influential team managers or employees that deeply live and breathe the company culture. The best launch committees will include both ideators (those coming up with launch activity ideas) and implementers (those responsible for executing). Ask your creative agency to chime in on ideation and execution too.

Step 2:
Identify brand ambassadors

Your company’s leadership will play a prominent position in the rollout—they set the tone for everyone else. After that, brand ambassadors extend this influence. These are key employees who are trained on the brand fundamentals and embody its ideals. How many ambassadors you’ll need depends largely on the size and reporting structure of the organization. Team leaders or directors below the C-suite level are typical candidates, but they can also be any influential personalities within your organization. (For example, everybody loves Denise and they naturally rally around her).

Step 3:
Formulate the full plan

A successful internal launch takes resources, so a documented plan and budget are essential. At Traina, we approach the brand rollout plan similar to a communications plan. It starts with objectives, moves to strategies, then results in specific tactics and messages. Download our preferred planning template, designed for this approach.

In general, we recommend a set of three, simple objectives to start your rollout plan, which can be adapted or expanded as needed:

Instill Understanding
Knowing the intention of the brand makes it easier for employees to truly get behind it. Consider complementary strategies and tactics, like some that address formal training (presentation of a brand guide) along with self-guided content on a company intranet, maybe a fun quiz that provides branded swag for its takers. 

Build Excitement
A new brand is a big deal. Employees should know how important a brand is and see it come to life at every turn. Enhancing physical areas with the new aesthetic demonstrates the company’s commitment to the new brand, while mailing out swag packages and providing custom video backgrounds can have a similar effect in the remote world. And whatever the format, celebrating the brand’s release—with themed employee contests, for instance—helps create an emotional tie to its ideals. 

Drive Adoption
As employees become invested in the brand, they too become ambassadors for it. At every available opportunity, your company and its teams should be empowered to award, reward and publicly celebrate employees that demonstrate behaviors aligned to the new brand.

The size of your company and the spectrum of work roles it has will have a bearing on the particular strategies and tactics needed to engage across multiple audiences or various locations. You may well end up with more ideas for a rollout than is reasonable given your available resources. Aim for quality, and once you assign line item costs per tactic in your plan, the budget can be a reality check. The final step is to assign responsibilities, and then the true work begins.

Step 4:
Create and train before launch

The value of the planning document comes to fruition here in Step 4, as the launch committee manages the creation and logistics of a rollout—from producing collateral and creating a launch video, to reserving time with leadership for brand training. While there’s much to do, prioritize the need for leadership and brand ambassadors to have a full understanding of the brand before it is revealed to the entire workforce. A new brand brings change with it, and employees will naturally take their cues from prepared leaders that exhibit acceptance and enthusiasm for this change.

Step 5:
Activate the rollout

From refreshing your intranet portal to new physical signage and identity updates in training materials, it’s unlikely that every single touchpoint within the company will instantly tout the new brand after launch—and that’s okay. The rule of thumb, however, is to roll out as many updated touchpoints as feasible in a single wave. Starting strong creates impact. And while a rollout often includes some “teaser” activities to generate anticipation, aim for a big reveal with a large-scale signature event to drive home the importance and transformative potential of the new brand. We helped the grocery chain Stater Bros. Markets do just this to great effect with training programs held before and after the signature event that unveiled their new brand.

Maintain momentum
Continue building on the excitement of the big reveal beyond the signature launch event. Creating activities that reinforce the brand in the days or even weeks afterward will underscore the value your company places on it, and further encourages behaviors that solidify the new ethos. This could mean recognizing employees that demonstrate relevant brand values or dedicating time during your regular company all-hands meeting to share how the brand is being lived out. At Traina, we schedule company activities that tie directly back to our brand values, and also hold an annual employee awards event (the “Taco Awards”—long story), to recognize team members who put those values into practice.  

Letting the World In
When done well, an internal brand rollout will inspire your teams and supercharge your company culture. Equally important, it sets up the external launch for success, as the brand must resonate inside the company if it’s going to be effective outside of it. Traina has helped orchestrate internal and external brand launches with tremendous success—on other continents, across media platforms, with influencers and in multiple languages. While it all starts internally, but eventually that brand goes everywhere. Inside or out, be in touch to learn how we can help launch your brand to win over your audience.

2023 was a remarkable year for rebranding as companies raced to catch up with the cultural shifts that have redefined our world. Enjoy our first annual Rebrand Report Card—a look back at the best and worst rebrands of 2023.

Pepsi: A refreshing move

Grade: A+

As the ultimate challenger to an entrenched heritage brand, Pepsi is constantly evolving its brand to stay fresh, connect with new audiences, and reflect culture. Pepsi’s 2023 rebrand preserves heritage while rejuvenating the system with animation, a bold new logotype, and a modern color palette (we love the black).

Nokia: To hell with heritage

Grade: A-

While this rebrand has gotten mixed reactions online, we admire Nokia’s courage in parting ways with their iconic logo and emphatically declaring their new vision as a company. And while the cut letter style is perhaps overused, this execution feels unique and fun, compelling the viewer to engage with the logo.

Twitter: One bird. One stone.

Grade: F

Perhaps no rebrand has ever been as universally hated as Elon Musk’s obliteration of the Twitter brand. It’s criminal. However, if a rebrand is intended to reflect the new direction of a company—then perhaps this one is a wild success. Like its new brand identity, “X” appears to be in a dark and dismal place.

Jell-O: Jiggly goodness

Grade: A

Sometimes a rebrand just feels right. The execution is so familiar, so on-point and dialed in, that the only question is “Why didn’t this happen sooner?”. That’s the case with Jell-O, whose playful refresh combines 3D block letters, flat colors, and hyperreal renders of fruit and pudding to deliver a delicious new visual system.

HBO Max: But why?

Grade: D

This rebrand plays out like a Jim Gaffigan joke: “Here me out…you know that part of our name that’s synonymous with excellence? Let’s kill it.” It’s hard to process the corporate logic behind this rebrand—that dropping “HBO” would somehow expand the platform’s reach. Our prediction: HBO Max returns in 2024.

Johnson & Johnson: Unscripted

Grade: C+

Another seismic abandonment of brand equity occurred when Johnson & Johnson dropped its 138-year-old script logo in favor of something…disappointingly pharmaceutical. Although the new logo lacks personality and distinction, we do love ampersands.

Baskin Robbins: Seize the Yay

Grade: B-

This rebrand was long overdue, and the move away from the klitchy pink and blue identity was a no-brainer. The vibrant new color palette, much improved typographic union of the “BR” and “31” logo, and “Seize the Yay!” tagline are all sweet improvements.

Slurpee: Brain-freezing fun

Grade: A+

From the slushy dollop monogram to the icy peaks of the custom font, this rebrand is just wild, brain-freezing fun. And the entire visual identity system delivers on that theme.

Space Center: A giant leap

Grade: A+++

OK, maybe we’re a little biased on this one. But the first rebrand of NASA’s official visitor center in 30 years was an astronomical leap forward—one that positions the organization to play a leading role in the future of space exploration. Check it out.

A brand rarely becomes a matter of life or death, but branding in healthcare is another story. And for the University of California Health Milk Bank a successful brand means supporting the most vulnerable of patients—babies born prematurely.

Headquartered in San Diego, the UC Health Milk Bank is a statewide organization that collects donated breastmilk and provides it to hospitals and individuals across California. The Milk Bank is the first and only co-branded organization to span all of UC Health—a feat of remarkable buy-in and support, and a testament to the amazing benefits and universal appreciation of mother’s milk.

The Milk Bank engaged with Traina in early 2020. With the emergence of the pandemic, our teams built the brand as all of healthcare was pushed to the limit. What emerged was a strong foundation and a clear way forward for a truly unique organization—one that serves the UC Health system, the State of California, and countless families who rely on life-giving nutrition and generous donors.

A versatile visual system

With a full scope comprised of visual identity, messaging and brand asset creation, our work with the Milk Bank began just as the University of California completed its own major rebrand, allowing for consistency and alignment. “We weren’t allowed to have our own ‘logo’ per se,” says the Milk Bank’s executive director, Lisa Stellwagen, “but that was fine because the UC Health lockup makes it clear that we serve California, under a brand that has such distinction in the state.”

CEO David Traina agrees: “We immediately saw the advantage of co-branding with UC Health. It leverages the equity of a world-class academic system in a formal logo. From there, other brand expressions can evoke the more personable aspects of the Milk Bank—its warmth and tenderness.”

Those qualities are captured with a custom bottle-top emblem, creating a powerful moment of connection between the Milk Bank, donors and the mothers they serve. “The bottle top is an important connection point for the Milk Bank,” says Traina. “It’s the gateway to nutrition, care and comfort. That point is where a brand needs to be.”

“It gives our bottles a really professional look,” adds Lisa, “one that lends confidence to the organization and stretches from customers to donors to philanthropic supporters. We use that mark everywhere, on our website and in other items like stickers and buttons—and it’s worn with pride.”

Self-Fulfilling Messaging

“I always laugh telling people about the origins of our tagline—‘The Standard in Newborn Nutrition.’ When we developed that together, we had yet to bank milk at all. Not a drop,” says Lisa. “But it’s manifested. We’ve become leaders in science, in customer experience and service; I was invited to be on the Standards Committee for the Human Milk Banking Association of North America—so it has truly become a reality. We’re setting the standard not just in our product, but in the science and collaboration we do throughout the nation.”

Traina’s suite of messaging also includes “Love in every drop,” a line which now graces the bank’s welcoming window graphic, amplifying this sentiment on social media with every visitor selfie. It’s also featured on the label developed for mother’s milk analysis—an homage to FDA “Nutritional Facts” information, showcasing the vitality of this essential source of life. “That line in particular really speaks to people—donors and recipients alike. It captures the power of what they are a part of, and it means so much to our donors that they’re helping children survive.”

Prepared for what comes next

The new brand was a blessing in the spring of 2022, when the Milk Bank had a spotlight during a nationwide baby formula shortage. When mass media outlets sought their expertise and provided a platform to ask for donors, the brand provided outward credibility and professionalism. “That media coverage activated all of Los Angeles overnight,” says Lisa. “We saw a fivefold increase in our online portal, which was ready to handle it. That increase went on for two months, and it continues to this day.”

With a record number of partnerships in just two years, and more than 2 million milliliters now in the bank, the UC Health Milk Bank has had a tremendous debut. But along with their impact, their ambition has risen as well. The bank wants to supply more donor milk to hospitals and NICUs in under-resourced areas, and aims to do so via direct outreach to health officials and advocacy for statewide legislation.

“These are newborn children in the poorest areas of California,” says Lisa. “They are made to receive the incredible benefit of human milk, and they’re just not getting it. That’s not right. For $4.80 an ounce, we can give them the chance to thrive in their first days of life. That’s our overarching goal this year, and we’re ready to make it happen.”

I love hoodies. An entire cubby of my closet is dedicated to them, where roughly two dozen hoodies hang crammed together like cotton-poly blend sardines. Among them is a Triumph Motorcycles hoodie that I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Despite being faded, stretched, and riddled with holes, it sees more action than all the others combined. Why? Because it’s just so easy and comfortable. Despite the pleadings of my wife and kids, and the occasional shaming of friends, I continue to wear that hoodie like it’s going out of style—which it did, at least a decade ago.

The faded brand

At Traina, we’re seeing a lot of tattered hoodies these days. In fact, we’ve been seeing them for a few years. Brand identities that were due for a refresh 3 to 5 or more years ago are starting to look faded, stretched, and riddled with holes. It’s a trend being seen by agencies nationwide. Due to a perpetual state of economic uncertainty, companies have tightened their marketing budgets and delayed their brand investments. And for many, the postponement of key branding initiatives has become a mission-critical liability. Like my favorite top, these companies are showing their age and making questionable impressions.

5 Reasons why now

If you’re one of these brands in need of a refresh, you probably know it. It may trigger a cringe when you open a presentation or share your URL, or when you see competitors who have recently refined their messaging and brand. You might assume that you can’t afford to invest in your brand right now, and instead go the “all-budget-eggs-in-the-demand-gen-basket” route—a short-sighted attempt to drive quick revenue.

But the fact is, there will never be a better time to invest in a rebrand than right now. That may sound disingenuous coming from the head of a branding agency, but below I’m going to drop five reasons why you cannot afford to let your brand identity issues continue to fester:

1. A rebrand will position you for growth now, and supremacy in the near future.
The economy will bounce back, and when it does, it will seemingly happen overnight. When morning comes, those companies that have invested in their brand will be positioned to capitalize on the wave of positive consumer and corporate sentiment. Those companies that have been actively investing in their brand, rather than ignoring it, will find instant traction with an audience starving for product.

When the pandemic devastated travel and tourism, Airbnb was on the ropes. In that scenario, cutting off all marketing dollars would have been the natural thing to do. But CMO Hiroki Asai did exactly the opposite. He saw the economic downturn as “an opportunity to reimagine Airbnb…and take a look at what the next iteration of Airbnb would be.” That iteration was about simplification, rallying the brand around its core offering, and refocusing on brand-driven campaigns. That bold decision had a tremendous impact on the brand and business, and within 24 months Airbnb reported its most profitable quarter ever.

2. Keep neglecting your brand—your competitors will thank you.
For companies that are procrastinating a desperately needed brand refresh, every day that passes is another share of the market slipping away, typically into the arms of their closest competitor. And while market share is easily lost due to neglect, it is notoriously hard to recapture. That’s because we humans are habitual creatures, and winning us back is a long, expensive, uphill battle. That’s true for even the most well-established brands. Just take a look at the soda space where some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Pepsi, 7UP, Sprite, Fanta, and Minute Maid, have undergone a flurry of rebranding initiatives in order to stay relevant and connect with new audiences.

3. Your team desperately needs a reason to believe.
In a down economy, all employees feel some degree of job insecurity. And nothing reinforces that feeling more than an employer whose brand identity is long past the point of expiration. The rebranding process itself offers opportunities to engage employees. That was the case for Space Center Houston, NASA’s official visitors center. Space Center Houston saw an opportunity not only to reimagine their dated brand identity, but also to energize employees by getting them involved in the process. Inviting employees of all levels to play a role in the rebrand instilled a new sense of purpose and enthusiasm throughout the organization.

4. There will simply never be a better time to partner with an agency.
With so many brands pressing pause, companies that do take action are getting a level of attention and prioritization from their agency partners that they would never see under normal circumstances. But that dynamic won’t last forever.

At some point in the near future, inflation will ease, markets will rebound, sentiment will jump, and there will be an inevitable run on agencies. Those companies that have put off their rebrand will suddenly be banging on the doors of every reputable branding agency in the country, begging for a proposal. Wait until that day, and you’ll pay more and wait longer to launch your long-overdue brand refresh.

5. Wait too long, and it may be too late.
So much has changed in the past three years. Whether you’re a brewery, a bank, or a biotech, the ground beneath your business has moved and today you exist in a much different space than you did when your current brand identity was developed. No brand is immune to the cultural shifts that have redefined our world. When a brand once considered relevant and cutting-edge starts to be perceived as traditional or generic, it can have devastating consequences. And once that perception is given sufficient time to take root, it’s difficult if not impossible to extract.

What can you do now?

I’m not necessarily advocating a wholesale, kitchen-sink approach to your rebrand. In many cases, a simple brand refresh will do. A refinement of your messaging strategy, a modern upgrade to your visual identity, or a redesign of your website may be all that’s required. And if budgetary constraints negate a comprehensive effort, then talk with your agency about a phased approach. Through strategic planning and prioritization, a rebranding effort (and budget) can be spread out over multiple quarters, tackling discovery, strategy, messaging, visual system, digital, and activation in a phased approach.

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If your fading brand identity has become a liability, there are really just two options: You can take your chances, hoping for a quick rebound and minimal damage to your image and audience. Or you can use this opportunity to strengthen your brand, expand your audience, and position your business to dominate when the floodgates open.

Has the number of brands become exponentially bigger in our modern age, or has the world just become smaller? Trick question: it’s a bit of both. The ease of starting a business—or at least intending to start a business—means that names can be snatched up wholesale and on a lark. Plus, the domain game is a global one, which means coming up with a unique name means competing with the entire world.

Bottom line: finding a distinctive brand or product name is no easy task. And when you layer on brand-specific criteria, the uphill climb can feel even more steep.

But it’s hardly insurmountable. We’ve named lots of things at Traina—financial services, scientific instruments, app-based businesses. And throughout our experience in naming, I’ve struck upon some unorthodox means of creating worthy contenders, if not the perfect name that captures a business completely. Here are a few lesser-known tricks of our trade:

Online inspiration

Google Images
Traditional, text-based search is a standard technique in seeking inspiration for brand names, but I’ve come to equally appreciate visual search results. Imagery is easy to scan and gives fertile ground for names that are less literal. For example, say we need a brand name that somehow says “extremely fast”. Traditional search results might provide links to definitions, synonym lists, and websites promising extremely fast weight loss. All are potentially helpful, but upon clicking over to images, a nuanced world of speed is revealed: cheetahs, rockets, race cars… wait! That driver gripping the steering wheel at 10 and 2… hmmm… “white knuckle.” That’s interesting, and would have been difficult to uncover by simply surfing through a list of synonyms.

AI Name Generators
So the robots are coming for our jobs, but while we still have them, why not use AI to our advantage? Some may consider this cheating, but if you ever use these online name generators, you’ll find they are comically bad. They suggest clunky, unrecognizable and trite name solutions at volume. 

So if they suck, why go here? Because they still construct words in ways my mind might not, and they will no doubt offer bad suggestions that I will instinctively try to improve. The mental gymnastics of improving upon a name usually conjure up unrelated, but appealing alternatives. For example, when AI once suggested optancereg, that inspired Optios. In other words, it’s natural intelligence making lemonade out of AI lemons.

Thesaurus Alternatives
There’s nothing more traditional than hitting up an online thesaurus—except maybe pulling that thick, dusty volume off a physical shelf. But there are some sites that I consider distant cousins to a thesaurus that can do the trick. Again, they typically don’t provide great literal names, but they serve up new ways to think about naming. My two go-to’s include reversedictionary.org, which serves up words related to the spirit of a phrase, and crossword-solver.io, which provides relevant responses to clue-like inquiries. These sites take the notion of a thesaurus further, providing new angles of approaching word associations that just might spark an idea.

Customer voices
Online product reviews or industry forums where customers interact and post about their experience can be a true goldmine. Borrowing honest language from a customer’s point of view can, at minimum, help you draft a compelling rationale for your name candidates, if not directly contribute to your working list of name ideas. In a real-life example, consumer comments on DNA testing blogs frequently mentioned getting a picture of one’s health—which inspired our naming of Picture Genetics.

AI Chatbots
The newest avenue for inspiration, AI chatbots (like Chat-GPT) are showing potential as a valuable resource for name ideation. Chatbots have been stealing attention away from all the other online resources I mentioned above. They are perfect substitutes for the thesaurus, and extremely effective at getting a preliminary snapshot of any trademarking conflicts for potential names. Perplexity.ai and Poe.com are free and my go-to AI apps.

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Offline inspiration

Magazines
Scanning for unique words in publications sounds inefficient, but here’s where I’ve found success: niche trade publications (and the deeper the niche, the better—think: Thoracic Pathology Monthly) and magazines that are devoted to very specific, distinct experiences (say, Scuba Diving or Birds&Blooms). Journals or magazines like these can present words you won’t typically find in broad online searches.

The occasional mass media can also provide some esoteric vocab. For example: I find the “Goings On About Town” column in The New Yorker ripe with uniquely descriptive words. How does one describe concerts and plays in a non-pedestrian, mostly pretentious way? You can’t say it was simply “nice”. It was “crackling”, “celestial”, maybe even “audacious.” Exposure to words of such abstruse nuance is not only a boon to an otherwise mantic naming process, but they may even surreptitiously enter your wonted vocabulary.

Printed dictionary
Speaking of vocabulary, the method above might challenge yours like it certainly does mine, so you may find yourself reaching for that other dusty volume on your shelf. The dictionary technique can be hit or miss for naming, so I limit time spent here, but just like fishing on a lake with no nibbles, out of the blue you may just land the big one.

Here’s the unscientific method: open the dictionary to any page and you’ll soon hit on words and definitions as enticing as they are novel. Using the same criteria of “extremely fast”,  my eye falls on the word “paradiddle”—not the most attractive of brand names, but I learn it’s “a quick succession of drum beats slower than a roll.” Thumbing over to “roll”, in that description I find the word “trill”, a rapid vibration. “Trill” seems promising; it has the trappings of a peppy brand name.

Admittedly, this method is a bit of a rabbit hole, which is exactly why it can work. I often arrive at a place that an open notebook and cup of coffee couldn’t possibly lead to on their own. And I realize how little of the English language I actually use.

Ask children 
As creatives, strategists and naming pros, we can sometimes fall victim to overcomplicating things. That’s why asking kids for suggestions is beneficial in two ways: First, it forces you to explain what you’re trying to name in a much simpler way than you’ve been thinking about it. And second, kids tend to give you some highly odd gems that they will explain to you with often inspiring, arbitrary or outlandish logic. Naming a new offering from a pizza franchise? “Call it ‘Wednesdays’,” I’m told, “because mom says we can only have pizza on Wednesdays.”

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Just as inspiration can come from any direction, let this list serve as a compass that points to our unique perspectives on naming. Of course, naming a brand is far more than just finding a good word. There’s teasing out the rationale behind it, understanding its bearing on the brand—what it dictates and denies—and how it will work within the fuller context of an identity system. Our work with the biotech company Velsera is a prime example of how naming is just one part of a brand ecosystem, and how important it is to develop it all together.

Learn more about how naming can be part of our creative partnership.

Our university magazine partners have a penchant for innovative ideas, which Traina is always happy to indulge. When a creative editorial team meets an agency that brings wild ideas to life, award-winning work will follow. 

UC San Diego Magazine, formerly known as Triton, has earned medals from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) every year of our partnership. But the award-winning innovations we’ve made go well beyond eye candy—many of the wildest ideas were creative solutions to problems behind the scenes. You’d never know this without the backstory, so here’s the scoop behind some of our most out-there creations:

1. Completely flipping an issue

Nothing unites a university more than two words: Capital. Campaign. Whether united in excitement or anxiety—or likely a bit of both—campaigns have the unique power of rallying people together with a common concept. 

UC San Diego’s latest campaign was all about “nontradition”—their shorthand for inventive ideas and intrepid character. The magazine took this theme as license to think audaciously in their campaign issue. The main feature This is Your Nontradition was designed to ground the concept in university history, and was a shoe-in for the cover. But then they secured an interview with alumnae Kate Rubins, an astronaut who had just returned to Earth. 

As you might expect, an interview with an astronaut comes with amazing imagery. In Rubins’ case, her spacewalk shot was made for a magazine cover. Bumping the campaign would be institutional suicide—but what if there were two front covers? 

Traina executed a double-cover, reversible magazine concept that read from the outsides-in. With attention to pagination, we arranged for the campaign feature to end in the exact middle of the book, where a vertically-oriented layout signaled the switch to read from the other end. 

The concept was also brought throughout the issue’s editorial, as explained in the contents: “In the spirit of nontradition, we give you a magazine like none you’ve ever seen before. Just like space itself—no up, no down, no beginning, no end. Read it, turn it, live it, learn it: that’s Triton.”

It’s a strange dance a university must do with its alumni. When I was a Traina client and editor-in-chief of UC San Diego’s alumni magazine, I often summed it up as, “getting someone to join a club they’re already in,” which is as awkward as it sounds. 

Some universities do this dance easily because the steps are taught at every turn. The campus oozes with pride and so does every graduate. Other schools have to reckon with alumni ambivalence, disinterest, maybe even animosity. 

Solicitation fatigue is often the major wedge driven between alumnus and alma mater, whether due to frequency (“I only ever hear from them when they want money,”) or an aversion to the very principle of alumni giving, which no one puts better than comedian John Mulaney:

Click to Play Video

Challenges abound when it comes to fostering engagement, receiving more dollars and increasing a university’s prestige and rankings. And while I am most certainly biased, I do believe that an alumni magazine can be the beating heart of the alumni/university relationship—the dance instructor, if you will—or to put aside my mixed metaphors, it can simply be the most versatile and valuable tool a university has in giving alumni what they want. 

But what do they want?

Alumni want to be engaged personally.

And this can be hard in the world of mass media and marketing. A magazine may not be as personable as an engagement officer in a 1:1 meeting, but it can simulate personalized messaging by strategically playing on common truths of the university  experience. 

For instance—not every alumnus had a great time at your university. For all the fondness that some alumni have, the memories of others might be focused on the pressure they felt, the uncertainties of the future, the stress of independence or the overall struggles of becoming. And I’d estimate that for every alumnus who has bad feelings about their time there, there are three alumni who have no feelings at all. 

Given such a spectrum, a mass message that appeals to alumni “love” for their university will fall flat for a good portion of its recipients. Its deniability makes the walk to the trash that much shorter. But other concepts can be just as big as “love” but universally true. I often used the undeniable fact that the university is where alumni come from, really digging into the significance of that phrasal verb. A university shapes you, tests you, makes you. Whatever your experience was then, and wherever you are now, you come from your university. And because that message means something different to all who receive it, its universality can create the guise of speaking personally.

The wait is almost over: months of anticipation, excitement, a bit of nervousness and maybe a fair share of nausea. But all this will be coming to an end, because the day is approaching and the final product is nearly ready to be delivered. Soon, you’ll meet your new brand strategy.

To be clear, brand strategy is not a baby. But there are similarities: they can change life as you know it, and they’re a marvel to watch as they grow into their full potential. And above all, the moment when they come into the world can be one of such relief, spectacle and utter disorientation you may well forget everything you prepared for and find yourself unable to comprehend what’s in front of you, let alone evaluate it. 

This is a quick guide to prepare you for that moment, and help you make the most of those first precious minutes when your brand strategy arrives—be it kicking and screaming, or calm and angelic. 

Welcoming your bundle of joyous brand strategy 

Developing a sound, solid strategy for your brand is a collective effort—you might say it takes a village. You and your team know your company best, and just like any doctor or doula, your agency is there for you: to listen and act on your concerns, offer knowledge and perspective, and lend support and guidance throughout the process. This is what you should expect of your agency, and what you can expect from a strategy that brings your brand into a new world of opportunity and growth.

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Matt Bachmann is chief strategy officer at Traina and a father to an articulate 10-year-old boy and two needy German Shepherds. Jarrett Haley is Traina’s copywriter and a dad to three children growing up way too fast.

Design systems aren’t exactly new in the branding world, but their usage is not yet widespread either, making them a considerable advantage for forward-thinking companies. How exactly? We brought together our creative and dev teams to explain: Mark Gallo, chief creative officer, Andrew Walpole, director of web development, and design director Lou Delgado lay out the power and possibilities of systematized design.

Let’s take it from the top—what is a design system?

LD: So as a designer, my perspective comes from actually using a design system to make things, so I see it as a connected set of patterns and shared practices, all coherently organized to serve the purposes of creating any kind of product that comes from a brand. It’s a streamlined, well-oiled machine that helps you create things quickly and easily. 

MG: I like that we all have different perspectives on usage of a design system: Mine is perhaps less tactical, as in, I’m putting forth the theory and applications of the system to clients and what it would mean for the brand as a whole. 

So in my opinion, the design system is the next evolution of a style guide, which has been the primary documentation of core elements, or a starting point for brand expression. Design systems are a far more developed tool to provide brands the agility they need to go to market quicker, by providing not only the working components, but the ability to iterate, collaborate and evolve the system across the organization. That’s my take; I’ll pass the ball to Andrew because it probably means something a little different to him in the web development world.

AW: I may say it in a different way, but my definition is similar: I think of design systems as operational tools. Similar to how lean methodology revolutionized manufacturing processes, design systems do so for a brand in a digital-first world. In the past, the main constraint of a brand used to be going to the printers, right? Once you printed that style guide, you couldn’t change anything or do it differently. Digital has changed the landscape for how often you need to hit publish, and design systems give the ability to hit publish more frequently in a digital-first world.

When you say “digital-first world,” it seems almost necessary to move forward—what makes a design system so important right now and in the future?

AW: Most immediately, I think of remote work and global teams—that necessitated a fresh look at how we deploy brands. If you’ve got multiple teams spread out, all contributing to something like a digital product, you need to develop a language that everyone can understand and speak fluently across your whole team, and you need the tools to work together, too. Nowadays it’s not just the folks building your app or your site who need brand resources, it’s the folks deploying your social media, or working on marketing or advertising or communications, they all need a similar set of tools and guidelines to help them work quickly because all this work is integrated.

MG: Here’s a recent example—one of our clients has multiple brands and therefore needs a multi-brand strategy. Looking at this huge Gantt chart, I immediately started with, How can we systemize this? How can we build one platform for all of their digital products that allows for pivoting between each brand on the fly? If we invest the time and resources to embed this capability into their digital platform, and create the brand toolkit with this goal in mind, they’ll be able to move much more quickly than they ever could before. One set of components can be modified to deliver across all their brands; changes and updates can be automated so you spend less time on tactical tasks, and more of your resources can be allocated to bigger tasks.

How does a design system differ from a template?

MG: Well, a template is final. And content is input into that template individually. But what if you decide after some testing that you want to make any changes or updates? You’d have to go back and adjust every single one of those templates. But a design system lets you change one component and it populates everywhere, throughout the entire system from that core element. 

LD: And on the creation side of things, you’re not just plugging things in, but actively building things from the design elements and modules that are in the system. So far we’ve been talking about it mostly in terms of just a web property, but the applications go way beyond—social platforms, newsletters, any brand product—having a system unites all these things and makes them incredibly dynamic.

Now we’re talking “tapping the power” of the design system; so let’s keep going and really define those powers.

LD: Efficiency, for one thing. Design systems can free your team up to be way more efficient. They’re no longer thinking about the size of headlines, what colors you need to use—that’s all established. There’s a vast library available to them, supported with code and modules and elements, all built out and organized into patterns, and your team can leverage these elements, resources and best practices to create products quicker.

I’d say cooperation and collaboration too—the number one thing that we want to do with our design systems is support the developer. Designing a product is one thing, but building it is another. A shared system helps these two worlds not only work well together, but it helps them make amazing things that have never been seen before.

MG: That’s a great point. We can no longer have the mentality that design and development are separate entities. A design system helps everyone take more responsibility for the build. It gives everyone the clarity they need to do their job effectively: design, develop, test, deploy.

AW: The view I take as a developer is that it helps the business. The efficiency it creates allows the business to move faster: design is faster, dev is faster, this allows the overall business to go faster, and that circles back on itself by freeing up resources that can be allocated to new products and new initiatives.

MG: Right, and especially for clients with internal creative teams, it’s far more effective to have a systemized approach in building brand products—that team can spend their time and money on answering questions like: “What is the right way to communicate this product to our audience? What is the strategy we’re going to use to deploy this?”

So, why is everyone not using a design system, then?

MG: Some clients may think, “We’ve been doing it this way for this long, we’d have to stop and rethink,” or, “This is great, but it might be too expensive in the short term.” Those are valid points. But if you’re thinking more than a year out on your trajectory, and asking “What can we do now that will drive our business next year?” I think that’s a different calculus.

AW: It is an investment. But just like any investment, there’s a return, and that’s a calculation to be done. But if a company knows that it’s scaling up, growing into multiple markets and wants to easily manage multiple products or iterations of a product—in that type of scenario, it’s smart to think about what a design system can unlock for you.

What excites you creatively about a design system? Is it simply an efficient tool, or what else could it inspire?

LD: There’s a kind of freedom about it—you can focus not just on how a button looks on a page, but on the greater experience of that webpage or other product. You can have the freedom to focus on making things interesting and develop new features that can really capture people’s attention.

One example, I once did a digital experience for a phone case and leveraged all of the pieces of the company’s design system so we devoted most of our thought to the hero opener and how it would animate. And we made an amazing scroll-based animation where the phone and the case come together and fan out to reveal all the colors, and that was possible because we were given the time to actually think about that and not, like, move this button two pixels left or right. We could tackle more impactful problems and really turn out something dope.

MG: I have a long background in print, so I tend to compare design systems to creating a publication—which requires us to make decisions on format, grid, type sizes, column widths, headline styles, all of that ahead of time. Same thing with a design system, the effort is put into establishing fundamentals at the outset, so in subsequent issues we can really focus on the big creative moments, opportunities where we have the most impact. When the foundational pieces are systematized, you can think bigger: What type of art can we create for these big moments? That’s a great place to be.

LD: In the end, it helps everyone get on the same page, which is a huge win that helps everyone be better partners. Whether it’s internal, or between us and a client, it just helps everyone do more and makes better, more long-term partnerships. Once the groundwork is laid with a brand, that’s when you can start blowing minds creatively.

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Navigating today’s cultural landscape can be complex, but there are huge benefits to be found in collaboration. Our marketing director Danielle Higgins and creative director Erwin Hines discuss here how people can work together with brands to achieve their goals, and the mutual benefits to be found in cooperation.

What are we talking about when we’re talking about brands and communities, communities and brands?

DH: Tying commerce to community can be a dangerous proposition. Communities are not built to fight against the big dogs, but to survive among them. There are ways to authentically use brands to uplift those communities, give their voice a platform and build wealth in those communities. It’s about people and where the power lies. 

EH: What I generally talk about in conversations like this is using the system to subvert the system. Especially now that we’ve entered into a new time where artists and creators have more power within the boardrooms, it’s what you do with that power that makes the difference. Not doing the same old, same old, but actually using brands and organizations as canvases to initiate change.

I’ll say too, I always speak about it in a way that’s aggressively for the artists and the people. We’re not here to provide tactics to organizations that aren’t authentically connected to communities, just so they can fakely connect to communities and profit off them. What I’m personally invested in is actual internal restructuring in organizations to authentically communicate.

DH: Yeah, a seat at the table is a great place to start, but we’re moving past that being enough. I’m interested in action and reaction, how our work as creatives is going to make life better for all of us, from the bottom up.

EH: The worst thing that could happen is brands coming into our communities, researching them, and then having this small group of people with power to then shape our community and the perspective of that community via the screens they control. 

That’s a big piece of the conversation for me—how brands control screens that end up shaping internal and external narratives about communities and marginalized communities. And how those brands can do a better job of actually telling fuller narratives and fuller stories so that communities don’t get one-dimensionalized. 

How can the relationship between communities and brands be a positive one? Not exploitative, not just a show, but one that’s beneficial on both sides?

EH: I think it’s all about how creatives and community leaders can use brands. I think of brands as a canvas, a very effective one. Because brands and organizations have tremendous pull: political pull, cultural pull, and if you can make an impact and help shift the perspective within an organization, you can then impact and shift things in all those arenas. Creative work has the power to do that.

Patagonia, for example. Patagonia actually does lobby and they do fight for the land. So does Keen shoes. They have people working to save public space. That’s when you can recognize the power of brands and organizations beyond the ability to sell some product; you can realize their potential on the political side and the agenda side. 

DH: Same within the beauty industry—Sephora was called out years ago to balance out their product line and carry more brands that were more inclusive to ALL women. And that’s because the women who ran those brands were bringing in their people, their communities, with democratized advertising driving sales that were going to shutter their business. Now 80% of the products inside of that store are brands represented by individual women. And because of the representation there, then you have breakout brands that go way, way, way beyond Sephora. They outperform DTC brands in any vertical—you’ve got Fenty, Tatcha, Iman, VonD, Kylie etc… it goes on… all of that was not possible, say, 20 years ago. It’s a big power shift and other industries have been modeling it.

EH: When you look at Telfar and the culture that Telfar represents, the black, queer underground culture of New York, that was never really represented by a brand in its totality before them. It was represented in subculture brands, for sure, and it was picked and pulled at by larger brands. There’s just some beautiful things that happen when you understand as an individual creator, like Telfar, the power of recognizing your own story, your own community, and then standing in that power and not giving it away to anybody, but becoming a brand that now has the influence, the prestige to then shape and shift different community infrastructures. 

Creators can be Robin Hood. Virgil Abloh? Robin Hood. He went into some of the biggest brands in the world, not really caring what they were doing, but focused on his mission, applying that mission and using the brands he worked with as canvases to speak up for communities, in his case, black creators and the black creative lexicon. To me, that’s such a cool, special thing right now that we as creators can recognize that kind of power.

How did this shift in power come about? 

DH: Technology is a huge part in the timing of these movements. The democratization of media, having access to audiences, to tools, the ability to reach people to such a degree didn’t exist before. There were gatekeepers, there were closed doors. It was the broadcasters and media companies and brands who were arbiters of what had a voice. Now it’s open—you can put what you’re doing out there to people before it has to go through their filter. You have a direct line in, and that conversation is loud, it’s everyone moving together in real time. 

EH: You can take music as one example—it probably had the most complex structure around it. Where a creator once had to book studio time, get engineering, distribution of physical things… Now, anyone can download a studio onto their phone, make their art on their phone, distribute their art from their phone. You have big artists like Steve Lacy, he’s making some of his beats just on his phone. 

And there are changes not just in creation, but the democratization of success and what that even means. Independent artists are recognizing that they only need their million followers. They don’t need stardom, some big, expansive reach. They have their million followers and they make a living from that in some way, shape or form. You no longer have to exist within the traditional structure that the world once said you had to exist in. Different economies are being created, ones that aren’t defined by anything, not brand, or government—the user gets to define what is the new economy.

This mass democratization of all things has really given people the ability to define a whole new world. Young people especially, they likely won’t have to work full-time jobs as we know them, and they don’t have to be defined by one singular thing ever in their life.

DH: And I tell you what, at least in the conversations I’m in, it’s not going to go back to the way it was, ever. No one’s going to let that happen, because the benefits are so much better for them. Nothing is going to go backwards. The speed of it all is dizzying, but a lot of fun to watch.

Where do brands fit into all this? 

EH: Like I said, I’m here to help people learn how to subvert brand systems to better their community. That’s what I always feel like I’m here to do. And I think once people started having as much, or more, power than some organizations, and organizations started paying influencers, as opposed to agencies, sometimes millions of dollars, those people became brands, and the playing field became level between an influencer who has essentially become a brand, and what we know as a “brand” brand.

DH: I think of Nicole McLaughlin, she’s a designer and engineer who wanted everyday detritus and common objects to have real meaning—her art started as a protest, yknow? It went beyond “upcycling”and reframed the fashion industry. She became “that” influencer. You can see her influence at Balenciaga, Patagonia, Dickies, Nike, Jansport, Puma, the list is really long. She sits on advisory boards for these huge companies helping them re-use and rethink their scraps and production—that’s a powerful relationship that benefits everyone. Changing global production models and supply chain dependencies from your IG feed? That happened because she used branded goods to do it.

I had an art professor who always said: “What is the artist’s job? To mirror the culture back on itself. That’s the job of the artist.” I look at our work as an agency in the same way: if an agency is setting the tone for the brand, we have to be out ahead of culture, on the front lines. It’s your duty to be out in front, paying attention all the time for the people who aren’t. That means being involved, genuinely. And as far as what I can make happen via brands through my work here at Traina, I’m always going to find opportunities to make things better for our communities. It’s a duty, really.

EH: I love how you bring up art. I’ve found people tend to separate design from fine art, but I agree we should all have a fine art mindset because at the end of the day, even if you’re designing something for a client, you’re still putting yourself into that. You’re recognizing that what you put out into the world has meaning, has reason, has purpose and it’s a reflection of who you are at that time. Over time you see that you’ll have periods as a designer—like Picasso had periods—you can trace back your life and see, Oh, this how I was feeling, this is what was happening in society, and you see that articulated in the work and the brands you work with.

So what can brands do to make a positive impact and a genuinely beneficial relationship with communities?

EH: My agenda on the brand side is essentially: You need to hire more individuals from diverse communities, allow them to cross-pollinate across different communities, and allow them to really speak to their community and speak for the needs of their community. With Nike, for instance, you can’t just say, or portray, that basketball is the only way out of the hood, because that’s an incredibly one-dimensional view you’re giving to those outside of the community, and the same from within—you now only see basketball as the way out, or rap as the way out, because those are the two things that are promoted to you.

Nike is a great example of a brand who is starting to use their influence to help reshape perceptions of communities. On top of highlighting athletes at the top of their game, they’re telling more nuanced stories of healers, artists, and other types of community members. In doing this, they’re expanding the possibilities of the community.

DH: It needs to be honest for sure, you have to really start from the inside out, not the other way around. Tokenism is a real thing. The blast that went out recently for Victoria’s Secret? It’s one of the most offensive pieces of media I’ve ever seen. They went from stick angels on a runway and a leadership sex scandal to a huge DE&I campaign that did more harm than good. They could have changed their leadership, the organization at its core, but instead on every channel, billboard, everywhere, this full blast of “fake inclusivity”—everyone saw through it and they had to pull it. They took action in the wrong direction, it was inauthentic and hurt their business. It missed the point.

EH: For that reason I’ll reference Nike again, because even though they’re not perfect, it feels like they’re really doing the work. It’s not just a mass blast all over every piece of media, a big show. They’ll work with these specific communities on small scale activations and they’ll promote something to specific communities, making micro-investments into local projects. 

DH: One thing brands could really benefit from in this discussion is the need to appoint people within your organization who are genuinely curating relationships with community, in addition to thinking about community from a business perspective. Let someone own this who knows this, then let it grow. There are brands doing this today: Nike, Jansport, Under Armor, RedBull, Monster. Alt bev has been doing it for years; the entire rise and acquisition of Saint Archer was through community skateboarding reps and their networks.

EH: Agencies can work like that too. They can be a force that helps brands truly identify opportunity in a real way, help shift brands and shift the conversation that brands are having. That’s why I’m at Traina, because I saw the ability to be more nimble within organizations, to actually become true collaborators. The collaboration model is really interesting, the fact that you could have so much power to shift organizations and create new collaborations, to be sought out for your perspective because brands acknowledge that they need help in connecting to a broader community.

DH: Brands can also help communities by just answering their questions – how do you get found? How do you get seen? How can you be a part of the conversation? The organizations that are doing it right—they’ve appointed people who are in charge of bringing communities in, answering questions and listening to their needs in a genuine way. They are distributing wealth, and that’s a good start.

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Before this sounds too much like doom-and-gloom, street corner soothsaying, I’ll say this: This is a good thing. The end is not nigh—far from it. These times bring abundant opportunities for those who are ready to move on them, and present remarkable chances for brands to make an impact: on people, on culture, and of course, on their own business.

When a brand becomes a force in these areas—that’s what we mean by a brand that moves. In our 17 years in the business, we’ve noticed a few qualities about such brands, and we’ve made these qualities our North Star, guiding our agency and the work we do:

Brands that move move hearts and minds.

Authenticity was once a brand’s gold standard, but today brands must level up from being simply authentic and be truly inspirational. What does moving people in such a way look like? It could be a brand that remembers who you are, that interacts with you in real-time and speaks to you like a person. A brand that is transparent in what it cares about, and uses values to inform its operations and what it stands for beyond selling units. A brand that tells a compelling story across platforms—visually, textually, digitally—and pushes the boundaries of every context in which it appears.

To move people is to offer an experience that not only goes beyond your competition, but goes beyond all expectation. Experiences of this caliber are the way a brand earns the invitation to be adopted as a part of someone’s life.

Brands that move move with speed and intent.

Economic and cultural landscapes have become inextricably tied to each other, and they both move lightning-quick. In a hyper-connected world, opinions and perceptions can catch and spread like wildfire. But brands that are nimble can seize opportunities to steer—or better yet, start—conversations, and show up for their customers and their communities in truly impactful ways. When a brand is active and aware enough to engage in culture and be a creative, uplifting force for people, everyone benefits—company, customer and community alike. It’s a rising tide that lifts all boats.

This ability to make such moves is enabled by brand strategy. When a brand is rooted in core values, when its vision is clear and it is driven by a distinct positioning strategy, decision-making accelerates. Clarity rules. Taking action becomes easy because you know where you stand, what you are willing to do, and what you might be willing to sacrifice to reach people and make the impact that matters.

Brands that move move the needle

When a brand can move minds and hearts, and move as deftly as culture demands, that brand becomes a company’s powerhouse for growth. It gives freedom for a company to move markets, to soar past goals and come up with new ones to crush. Motion creates momentum, and it all works to move a company forward: the passion of their people, the inspiration of customers, the swiftness of operations and the communities that feel the benefit—it all adds up and makes for radical business growth.

That is, if a brand is intrepid enough to really go for it. Most brands sit back on the sideline and watch other companies making moves, thinking that today’s marketplace is overrun with fads they can stand to ride out, at least until things return to “normal”—that lower bar of what should be expected of a brand.

But that bar will not lower, and that time will never return. High expectations are the norm, and truly, they always have been for us at Traina. We have always believed that a brand must do more and be more, and for 17 years we’ve helped brands do just that. Now we see what’s ahead: how a brand must move people in order to move itself. And again, this is a good thing. Because for all that can be said about the times we’re in, these are the times that call for us all—brands, people, creatives, consumers, communities, CEOs, CMOs, and now DAOs—we must all be fully conscious of our power, and how we can use it to move each other in new ways that move our world forward.

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David Traina is the founder and CEO of Traina.